AAVE $50M slippage loss
A reportedly catastrophic swap that wiped out nearly $50M was attributed to user execution error and aggressive MEV bots—Aave Labs confirmed no protocol exploit occurred, the protocol performed as designed, according to reporting explaining the incident. The episode has reignited calls for advanced routing, pre‑trade simulation and institutional slippage controls.
March 12 saw a single on‑chain collateral swap routed through Aave’s CoW Swap widget convert roughly $50.432 million aEthUSDT into about 327 aEthAAVE (≈$36,000 in value). (theblock.co) Aave and CoW Swap published competing post‑mortems on March 15; Aave’s report corrected interface‑fee math and announced a new “Aave Shield” guardrail. (web.ourcryptotalk.com) CoW Swap’s autopsy points to three infrastructure failures — a stale gas ceiling filtering better quotes, a top solver that won auctions but never broadcast transactions, and evidence the order leaked from a private RPC to the public mempool. (theblock.co) On‑chain reconstructions attribute the lion’s share of value extraction in the executed block to a builder/MEV capture of roughly $36.9M, with block inclusion incentives also visible in validator receipts. (tryethernal.com) Aave’s new default protection blocks swaps with price impact above 25% (users must opt out in settings to proceed), a change Aave says will be pushed to the interface immediately. (theblock.co) Aave confirmed it collected $110,368 in interface fees from the transaction and pledged to return them pending verification, while CoW DAO committed to refund any protocol fees that flowed to CoW; the affected wallet has not publicly surfaced. (rekt.news)
